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New Solar Panel Design Traps More Light

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the thousand-points-of-light dept.

GoSun wrote in with an article about new solar panels that opens, "Sunlight has never really caught fire as a power source, mostly because generating electricity with solar cells is more expensive and less efficient than some conventional sources. But a new solar panel unveiled this month by the Georgia Tech Research Institute hopes to brighten the future of the energy source." The new panels are able to produce sixty times the current of traditional models.

2 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Cost comparisons by aegl · · Score: 5, Interesting
    People keep dismissing solar because it can't compete in price against traditional large scale ways of generating electricity.

    But it doesn't matter to me that some hydro-electric plant far from my house is making power at $0.02 per kWh, what matters to my economic reality is that my local power company charges just over $0.08 for the first dozen kWh delivered each day and then has a sliding scale that goes up to $0.36 kWh for increased amounts of power.

    Before I installed solar panels a high percentage of my power was costing me that top rate. So the relevent economic calculation for me is the cost to install my panels divided by the expected number of kWh that they will generate across their lifetime. This number comes out at about $0.16 per kWh. So I'm better than breaking even now, and assuming that energy prices continue to rise, I'll do even better in years to come.

    The final kicker in the equation is that I've switched to a time-of-use tariff so across the summer the power company will credit me with $0.209 for excess power that I generate in peak hours (between 1pm and 7pm), and $0.112 for partial-peak (10am-1pm + 7pm-9pm).

    If I'd taken the capital that I used to install the panels and invested it instead, I'd have to maintain a >19% annual pre-tax rate of return to beat the panels. Possible, but extremely unlikely (especially with my stock-picking track record!).

  2. Re:Efficiency is not really important by BarneyL · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Surely the $/Watt includes all the things you have just thrown in so when calculating your examples:

    1) The cost of the land would have to be taken in to account
    2) The cost of maintenance would be taken in to account
    3) The cost of legal fees and vet bills for treating spontaniously combusted neigbours pets would be taken in to account.

    The parent's point still holds, the important factor is the total cost of a PV system (installation, land space, maintenance and enclosure costs included) divided by the power it produces.